BEIJING, March 21 (Reuters) – Chinese artificial intelligence startup Manus is receiving a boost from Beijing, signaling the country’s continued effort to bolster domestic AI firms. The company’s China-facing AI assistant registered on Thursday and was featured in a state media broadcast for the first time.
This move underscores Beijing’s strategy of supporting Chinese AI companies that have gained recognition, particularly those with the potential to challenge the global tech landscape.
Manus has attracted attention as investors search for the next breakthrough like DeepSeek, a Chinese company that shook up Silicon Valley with its AI models. DeepSeek’s models performed comparably to those of U.S. competitors but were developed at a fraction of the cost.
Manus gained traction on X a few weeks ago by claiming to have created the world’s first general AI agent, capable of autonomous decision-making and task execution. This agent purportedly requires significantly less prompting than AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
Beijing is showing support for Manus’s introduction in China, mirroring its response to DeepSeek’s success. State broadcaster CCTV devoted television coverage to Manus for the first time on Thursday, showcasing a video that compared its AI agent against DeepSeek’s AI chatbot.
Further solidifying its position, the Beijing municipal government announced on Thursday that a Chinese version of Manus’s AI assistant, called Monica, has completed the necessary registration required for generative AI apps in China, overcoming a key regulatory hurdle.
Chinese regulations mandate that all generative AI applications released within the country must adhere to strict rules. These rules are meant, in part, to prevent the generation of content that Beijing deems sensitive or harmful.
Last week, Manus announced a strategic partnership with the team behind Alibaba’s Qwen AI models. This collaboration could further aid the rollout of Manus’s AI agent in China. Currently, the agent is only accessible to users with invite codes and has a waiting list of 2 million, according to the startup.
